New York University is an integral part of the metropolitan community of New York City—the business, cultural, artistic, and financial center of the nation and the home of the United Nations. The city's extraordinary resources enrich both the academic programs and the experience of living at New York University.
Professors whose extracurricular activities include service as editors for publishing houses and magazines; as advisers to city government, banks, school systems, and social agencies; and as consultants for museums and industrial corporations bring to teaching an experience of the world and a professional sophistication that are difficult to match.
Students also, either through course work or in outside activities, tend to be involved in the vigorous and varied life of the city. Research for term papers in the humanities and social sciences may take them to such diverse places as the American Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Modern Art, a garment factory, a deteriorating neighborhood, or a foreign consulate.
Students in science work with their professors on such problems of immediate importance for urban society as the pollution of waterways and the congestion of city streets. Business majors attend seminars in corporation boardrooms and intern as executive assistants in business and financial houses. The schools, courts, hospitals, settlement houses, theatres, playgrounds, and prisons of the greatest city in the world form a regular part of the educational scene for students of medicine, dentistry, education, social work, law, business and public administration, and the creative and performing arts.
The chief center for undergraduate and graduate study is at Washington Square in Greenwich Village, long famous for its contributions to the fine arts, literature, and drama and its personalized, smaller scale, European style of living. New York University itself makes a significant contribution to the creative activity of the Village through the high concentration of faculty and students who reside within a few blocks of the University.
University apartment buildings provide housing for nearly 2,000 members of the faculty and administration, and University student residence halls accommodate over 11,500 men and women. Many more faculty and students reside in private housing in the area.